Poll of the Day > It's weird to say since I use partial ad block but I wish ads were more relevant

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's all dumb stuff like

"Check out this baby"
"Top 10 most violent dogs"
"Doctors hate him!"
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Stop clicking clickbait.
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For a while on another site I was getting ads for Depends underwear until I closed them out a few times. I don't know what I was searching for that made the site think I wanted ads for that.

Yeah if they show me stuff Im actually interested thats pretty awesome. Like when YouTubes ad is for a upcoming horror or thriller usually Ill watch the full ad, if its something stupid like a toothpaste ad I couldnt skip it fast enough.
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I'm getting navy ads, MAGA ads, incontinence underwear ads, and ads for women's sandals.

Come on Google, you know I can't join the Navy if I'm too old to hold my crap. You know I'm not a woman if I'm voting for Trump.
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all I get is dr pepper ads and I don't like dr pepper
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I was just telling my gf about Chelsea manning (she posted a pic of her on top of a building about to jump on Twitter last night) and now all my ads are suicide hotlines and therapy ads. Fuckin creepy.
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I started blocking ads on this site back when they started running Sprint ads that would lock up or even crash my browser whenever they loaded on a page. And even if I hadn't, I absolutely would have blocked ads after they later had a few ad links that actively led to malware.

If the admins of the site don't give enough of a fuck about their users to engage in even rudimentary quality control, then I don't give enough of a fuck about them to want them to profit from me in any significant way.


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I started blocking ads on this site back when they started running Sprint ads that would lock up or even crash my browser whenever they loaded on a page. And even if I hadn't, I absolutely would have blocked ads after they later had a few ad links that actively led to malware.

If the admins of the site don't give enough of a fuck about their users to engage in even rudimentary quality control, then I don't give enough of a fuck about them to want them to profit from me in any significant way.

All the ads come from Google, which GameFAQs has no control over.
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I'm glad when my ads aren't relevant. They're easier to pick apart and not fall prey to, lol
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Ad science is a failure.

If they were doing something right people would want to look at them and feel the need to purchase the product.

I think their real purpose is to manufacture market dominance.

Yellow posted...

All the ads come from Google, which GameFAQs has no control over.

They choose which ad server to use in the first place, which is the point where their responsibility begins.


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I use full adblock cause fuck ads in general. Most are full of malware anyway.
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Revelation34 posted...

I use full adblock cause fuck ads in general. Most are full of malware anyway.

I won't go online without it. It's an avenue for malware. I don't like Google nor advertising.

DPsx7 posted...

I won't go online without it. It's an avenue for malware. I don't like Google nor advertising.

I have to temporarily disable it sometimes for certain things to work properly. Then I remember when I get ads longer than the actual video on YouTube.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yellow posted...

All the ads come from Google, which GameFAQs has no control over.

They choose which ad server to use in the first place, which is the point where their responsibility begins.

It's not that simple, particularly because all ad networks suffer from this issue to some extent.

Ad providers upload their ads to the network and the network QA is supposed to catch the bad ones, but - for a variety of reasons - "bad" ads (ranging from ads that are annoying, NSFW, or straight-up malware) can slip through, often by way of malice on behalf of the ad creator (which is exactly why most ad networks now feature a "report this ad" function).

The issue is not with any one player; the entire system is broken. The end users don't like it because of annoying or dangerous ads, the advertisers don't like it because they have shockingly little control over who sees their ads and profits from their ad dollars (like Google's own adverts showing up on ISIS recruitment videos on Youtube), and the hosts don't like it because bad ads scare away traffic while ad-blockers kill their main means of generating revenue (and that is a significant problem - more than 50% of internet connections now use an ad blocker and a good portion of the ones that don't are on smartphones, which have much less space for ads compared to a computer).

I find that people dramatically underestimate the scope and scale of this issue. The entire free internet - from Youtube to Facebook to Google to this very site - is built on the dollars of ad revenue and that system is now showing some very significant signs of collapse (like Youtube's "adpocalyse" a while ago). There's a reason why seemingly every independent website these days has a Patreon and is soliciting donations, because advertising money just isn't enough to keep the doors open anymore. This is, to my eye, a problem that is just as threatening to the idea of a free, independent internet as Net Neutrality (with a lot of the same outcomes if advertising collapses altogether), but unlike NN there's no one actor to blame and no government agency to lobby in order to fix the issue.
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darkknight109 posted...

I find that people dramatically underestimate the scope and scale of this issue. The entire free internet - from Youtube to Facebook to Google to this very site - is built on the dollars of ad revenue and that system is now showing some very significant signs of collapse (like Youtube's "adpocalyse" a while ago).

So, sell ads. Carve out a "your ad here" box somewhere in the layout, stick a hyperlinked jpeg in there, and charge a monthly rate or something.
What's actually happened, is site operators get a line or two of 3rd-party javascript and treat it like a magic money button, with no idea (or care) what that mystery script actually does, then pile on a bunch of mystery "analytics" scripts, just to tell that site operator that nobody is clicking on the ads, or even really looking at them, or that user#x0fac45afedefab561259 searched for polonium tampons on some other site and lead condoms on another.

The rest of out here got sick of scripts loading other scripts loading other scripts loading other scripts, popups spawning popups, annoying autoplay videos that move over to the corner and stay there, overlays with tiny-x close buttons that may not even work, and all the goddamn surveillance attached. So, we've shut all that shit down, and the willful ignorance of blindly trusting some-odd ad network (or usually several at once) has bit website revenue right in the ass.

When I enter gamefaqs.gamespot.com in my browser, I'm intending to look at content from gamefaqs.gamepsot.com, not evidon.com, cbsinteractive.com, qualtrics.com, demdex.net, taboola.com, agkn.com, moatads.com, criteo.com, indexww.com, adsrvr.org, sharethrough.com, scorecardressearch.com, doubleclick.net, adnxs.com, rubiconproject.com, casalemdia.com, fastly.net, advertising.com, adsafeprotected.com, 2mdn.net, truste.com, googletagservices.com, iasds01.com, trustx.org, serving-sys.com, trustarc.com, or whatever the hell else domains any of those decide to forcibly insert into the DOM.

What the fuck is wrong with your website when you're loading scripts from twenty-eight domains, and trying to set cookies for twenty-four domains?
Bullshit like that is why people block ads and install privacy plugins, almost reflexively nowadays, and increasing in numbers all the time.

Questionmarktarius posted...

So, sell ads. Carve out a "your ad here" box somewhere in the layout, stick a hyperlinked jpeg in there, and charge a monthly rate or something.

This is a perfectly reasonable approach for the internet of 20 years ago, and an absolute non-starter for today.

Back then, the content of website was set almost entirely by the hosts. Where user-made content existed, it was largely in the form of forums or chatrooms and was generally ancillary to whatever the main purpose of the site was.

Now? The overwhelming majority of time spent online is spent looking at content created by people other than the company hosting it, whether that's Youtube, Facebook, or Imgur. And that's a significant problem for advertisers because if I'm spending money to put my ad on your website, I want to know that the eyeballs that are seeing it are ones that are actually valuable to me. If I sell arthritis medication in Sweden, I don't want to waste my money by having my ad shown to eight-year-olds in Australia.

That's exactly why we have ad scripts in the first place. There's far, far too much content on sites like Youtube for them to be manually reviewed and have advertisements placed that way, so the algorithm looks at who you are, where you live, what sort of videos and websites you visit, and shows you ads it thinks will be relevant to you (which, at least on the surface, is not an indefensible practice - I would much rather see ads for things I'm actually likely to buy rather than stuff that isn't even remotely applicable to me).

The internet has moved far beyond the sort of model your advocating. No advertiser would ever support that model and understandably so.
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Lokarin posted...

"Doctors hate him!"

J_Dawg983 posted...

Yeah if they show me stuff Im actually interested thats pretty awesome. Like when YouTubes ad is for a upcoming horror or thriller usually Ill watch the full ad, if its something stupid like a toothpaste ad I couldnt skip it fast enough.

tbh, losing out on movie ads (and to a lesser extent gaming ads) is pretty much the only thing I miss since starting to use adblocker some years ago... and, ironically enough, the site that pushed me over that tipping point *was* Youtube. (Although even prior to that I was concerned by malware from ads.)
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Revelation34 posted...

DPsx7 posted...

I won't go online without it. It's an avenue for malware. I don't like Google nor advertising.

I have to temporarily disable it sometimes for certain things to work properly. Then I remember when I get ads longer than the actual video on YouTube.

Very rarely will I try that. Most times if a site doesn't work because of Adblock I simply won't go there. If something is blocked then there must be a good reason, and if that something is essential to your site working then my trust level falls.

I've not seen an ad on YT in many years.

DPsx7 posted...

Very rarely will I try that. Most times if a site doesn't work because of Adblock I simply won't go there. If something is blocked then there must be a good reason, and if that something is essential to your site working then my trust level falls.

I've not seen an ad on YT in many years.

I meant disabling it for other sites then remembering to enable it again because of Youtube.
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